Voting Third Party

I couldn’t watch the Sunday morning talk shows. Abetted by major media, both campaigns are doing their best to make sure we all vote based on emotion rather than reason. The leading stories are mostly about how crazy is Trump today? … and the underlying message is how lucky we are that Clinton has this election sewn up …. as long as no one is foolish enough to vote for Trump, stay home or Horrors!  vote third party.

Though Gary Johnson’s Libertarian ticket is polling about 8%, the media is concentrating on attacks against Jill Stein’s Green Party which is only polling about 4%. Why? Probably because Johnson will likely attract antiTrump Republicans while Stein is actively seeking to latch on to disappointed Sanders supporters.

So many folk cite Ralph Nader as the reason that Al Gore lost to George Bush, conveniently forgetting that the media roasted Gore relentlessly, that Gore ran a lackluster campaign, that Gore lost his home state, and that the Florida Supreme Court gave Florida to Bush. Some polls claim that Nader took more votes away from Bush than Gore, but just as the media wanted everyone to believe that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet, they want us to believe that he only lost because some people voted for Nader.

On TomDispatch and Informed Comment, former Army Colonel and conservative historian Andrew Bacevich takes time away from criticizing American geopolitical blunders to long for serious candidates to make those blunders. In, The Decay of American Politics – An Ode to Ike and Adlai, Bacevich observes:

So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one’s head against a brick wall without evident effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much.

Bacevich identifies money, identity politics, and belief in a pseudo-reality as the reasons behind our current pseudo-election. But despite a litany of complaints against Clinton, he defers to the establishment playbook wherein Trump is a fate too horrible to be imagined.

And Bacevich doesn’t mention Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Though Clinton and Kaine half-heartedly oppose aspects of the sweeping trade agreement, Obama still hopes to push through and sign the TPP after the election, and needs only 51 votes in the Senate. Many pundits think a Trump victory would probably kill the TPP, (as would a Stein or Johnson victory). A Clinton victory is no guarantee of anything.

The Evil of Two Lessers

Back in March, I thought that we were going to have Two Weak Candidates. And in May I thought that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were Obnoxious and Disliked, respectively. Of course, Trump is engendering more dislike every time he opens his mouth, and Hillary seems all the more obnoxious after out-maneuvering Bernie Sanders, with the collusion of the Democratic National Committee.

Now I see that both campaigns are beating the drum of voting for the lesser of two evils. “Lesser of two weevils,” was a great joke in The Fortune of War, (and later in the film, Master and Commander), but it is no joke to be pressured to vote for one of two lousy candidates. Establishment Democrats point to Trump as a budding Strongman, and in truth, he shows all the signs. But anti-establishment Republicans point out that anyone voting for Clinton and expecting anything to change is even crazier than Trump.

A lot of folk don’t want anything to change. I’d say about 25 to 30% of American people are doing quite well, thank you very much, and while they may give lip service to helping the working class, and the jobless class, and the folk trying to pay for health care, and the folk being shot, and the planet dealing with climate change – ultimately they would rather vote Clinton, kick the can down the road and keep watering their lawns.

As for the rest, we have to decide between strategic voting and protest voting, because there is no good choice. I think the Green Party’s Jill Stein is a good person, with a good platform, but little practical experience in governing. I don’t care for libertarianism, but I think a lot of people will consider the ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld capable and acceptable.

A commenter noted that your vote probably only matters in the half dozen or so swing states, and the FiveThirtyEight forecast agrees. Maryland’s electoral votes will go to Clinton, West Virginia’s will go to Trump, but states like Pennsylvania and Ohio are in some doubt.

In Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win, Michael Moore is trying to energize Clinton support by arguing that Trump will pull off an upset. His first reason is Midwest Math , or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit:

I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.

I could see PA going to Trump.

Congress will still be dysfunctional under any president unless we replace a lot of entrenched candidates, so the best effort right now is to look for non-establishment candidates in state and local races.

Strongman, Weakman

McClatchy asks, Is Donald Trump just another Latin American strongman?

The politics of real estate mogul Trump may be the polar opposite of Chávez’s socialism, but experts say he uses the same tools to charm the public that Chávez and other charismatic strongmen have. Political correctness is thrown out and replaced with brash talk. They paint themselves as the only leaders capable of returning their countries to former glory.

Francisco Mora, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere from 2009 to 2013, calls Trump the “North American version” of the caudillo.

The specifics may be different, Mora said, but the general outline is the same: the charisma, the polarizing personality, the stoking of fear and the anti-establishment message.

“Trump is clearly in the camp of a populist demagogue; that is to say he makes all kinds of outlandish promises.” said Mora, who is the the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. “Like caudillos of Latin America, he’s extremely divisive. The opposition is not the opposition, it’s the enemy. It’s the demonization of the other.”

The best politicians have the ability to energize large groups of people. But Mora said Trump and caudillos connected on a deeper level. They can mesmerize an audience. They develop an almost messiah-like quality, transcending the institutions they charge are corrupt.

I called Trump a Strongman back in September 2015 , and I still suspect the reason he is connecting has to do with supporters who want an alternative or at least to make a protest vote. A lot of comfortable establishment intellectuals have dismissed Trump supporters (and Brexit supporters) as nativists and racists, but there is no doubt that the current governing paradigm is to make empty promises to a lot of the people that used to make a decent living working with their hands.

I also noted that Trump needed backing in the oligarchy, but some of them have come out and said that they could work equally well with Trump or Hillary Clinton, which means that nothing substantive would be likely to change for the people that need it.

Other Lenders Faltering, Too

In the wake of Lending Club’s executive purge, the New York Times adds specifics about the Club’s transgressions. According to, As Lending Club Stumbles, Its Entire Industry Faces Skepticism, CEO (and sailboat racer) Renaud Laplanche had an undisclosed stake in at least one concern seeking loans. Other executives were involved in changing of information on paperwork.

… on Monday, Lending Club announced that Mr. Laplanche had resigned after an internal investigation found improprieties in its lending process, including the altering of millions of dollars’ worth of loans. The company’s stock price, already reeling in recent months, fell 34 percent.

And it isn’t only Lending Club that is hurting.

The company’s woes are part of a broader reckoning in the online money-lending industry. Last week, Prosper, another online lender that focuses on consumers, laid off more than a quarter of its work force, and the chief executive said he was forgoing his salary for the year. …

Wall Street’s waning demand for loans exposed the Achilles’ heel of marketplace lending. Unlike traditional banks that use their deposits to fund loans, the marketplace companies discovered how fleeting their funding sources can be.

Since the start of the year, Lending Club has raised interest rates on its loans three times to sweeten their appeal to investors.

I regularly get mailers from Lending Club, Prosper, Embrace and various debt consolidation outfits – all of which feed the shredder.

In a potentially related vein, a few days ago, Donald Trump made heads explode by suggesting that he might want to renegotiate $19 trillion dollars of US debt. Just about all the traditional and new media outlets rushed to denounce such talk as evidence of Trump’s political inexperience, but on CNBC’s Futures Now show, Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff said,

“Trump just admitted on CNBC that America has too much debt to afford a rate hike, and that he wants our creditors to accept less than 100 cents on their Treasuries. In other words, Trump knows a U.S. government default is inevitable.” …

Schiff has long been opposed to the Fed‘s so-called easy money policies. He insists that rather than helping the economic backdrop, the excess liquidity has created fragile asset bubbles so fragile that may send the U.S. spiraling into a recession worse than what occurred during the financial crisis.

One of the dilemmas of being both a social progressive and a believer in energy depletion is that progressives, including Bernie Sanders, confidently assert that the US economy has enough wealth that it should be the rising tide to lift all boats.

Energy depletion gurus, though, predict increasingly hard times for everyone, which puts them in an odd agreement with many conservatives, though for an entirely different reason. I suspect that Donald Trump may be right about US debt, though I suspect some version of austerity will be part of his solution.

7-11, Heroin AM and Porn

The top mainstream news story on CNN today is that Donald Trump said 7-11 when he meant 9/11 – thus disqualifying him from public office. Despite countless opportunities, Rudy Giuliani never failed to say 9/11 properly, so there you have it.

Another big story is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Saturday Night Live poked fun at the over-prescribed painkillers that have helped to bring the heroin epidemic to white suburbia. According to CNN, the skit with JLD pitching Heroin AM has led to calls from some quarters to boycott SNL.

Today, I got a news release from Addiction Care Interventions, a New York chemical dependency treatment center that is advocating a viewer boycott of “Saturday Night Live” over the heroin commercial….

A Wisconsin sheriff issued his own Sunday-morning news release that called the skit an “unfortunate incident” that the community can survive by using the whole sorry affair “as an opportunity to once again have a conversation about the fight against heroin and the misuse of opiate prescription drugs.”

As an anecdote, I didn’t have or mention any great pain, but was prescribed Tylenol 3 with codeine for my Deep Vein Thrombosis. I was hesitant because I once took that stuff back in the 1980s after having two wisdom teeth pulled, and it made the room spin. I took one before bedtime, then had intense dreams until waking at 2 AM, and was not able to fall asleep again. So the next day I both had a swollen leg and was dog tired. On a client visit I ran into a drug counselor who urged us all to throw away our old meds lest someone steal them.

The Washington Post had an article last week to the effect that pornography has become a public health dilemma, and now Utah’s governor is signing a resolution saying just that and also signing a bill requiring that IT techs report any porn they find on customer’s computers to the authorities. A real crackdown on porn would be interesting because it is reportedly by far the main driver of internet traffic. Requiring people to rat out their clients is a scary thought, though. It sounds like a law that could be selectively enforced.

I do think that most porn is unrealistic, but so is any fantasy material. Look at all the beautiful, willing women dating the gangly nerds in Big Bang Theory. Then look at all the products the characters are holding. There is an agenda behind most of the stuff that is flashed before our eager eyes, and we have to learn the difference between fact and fabrication, truth and truthiness by ourselves.

Primary Snapshot II

According to FiveThirtyEight’s delegate targets, here’s where the candidates were on March 3rd, after Super Tuesday when a Trump vs Clinton contest looked inevitable:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 338/297 – 114%
Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

Here’s where they are on March 28th:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 754/789 – 96%
Cruz – 465/882 – 53%
Kasich – 144/657 – 22%

Clinton 1267/1174 108%
Sanders 1037/1129 92%

Trump is no longer a lock for the Republican nominee, not because of votes, but because the RNC seems to be considering rule changes that would lock him out. Cruz has fallen off pace, Rubio dropped out and the lone remaining establishment candidate, Kasich, has no path to winning on the first ballot.

But the Republicans are truly trapped. If they finagle Trump out, they will openly alienate the blue collar segment of their base, and could become an irrelevant third party. If they allow Trump’s win, though, they risk becoming an extremist American Ba’ath party. They would probably lose the election, but as Michael Wolraich described in a recent Salon interview, even losing elections can signal the start of a powerful movement. Wolraich was talking about progressives, but the Tea Party movement has been smoldering for almost a decade.

Clinton has dropped by seven percent, is out of Southern states, but still is considered the presumptive nominee by both the mainstream and much of the new internet media. Sanders has risen by eight percent, has momentum and solid fundraising, but is out of caucus states. Sanders must continue to win decisively but his main hurdle will be winning New York, which is his home state, but Clinton’s adopted state.

The Democrats are not trapped, but do risk alienating those millennial voters that should be their future core constituency. Since Arizona, the shadow of voter suppression looms large. One of my office friends thinks Hillary will have to ask Bernie to the prom, as VP, to keep her party together. Sanders has already said he would not look to include Clinton in his cabinet, so I would have bet against him being part of a neoliberal Clinton ticket. But she needs him much more than he needs her, and in a recent Young Turks interview Sanders cited a long list of policy demands that would reconcile him with the Clinton platform. So it is at least possible.

Voting for the next Bogeyman

According to FiveThirtyEight, all the candidates have fallen off the pace they were on after Super Tuesday (except that Kasich replaces Rubio). Here’s where they were on March 3rd::

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 338/297 – 114%
Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

Here’s where they are on March 16th:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 652/719 – 96%
Cruz – 407/804 – 54%
Kasich – 146/582 – 25%

Clinton 1100/1050 108%
Sanders 778/968 83%

The one who has dropped the most, Trump, may be headed to a brokered convention because he has fallen under 100%, and there are dozens of theories about how that may play out. Clinton has dropped 7% but FiveThirtyEight considers her a lock; Sanders, who has dropped only 1%, is now presented as mathematically eliminated:

… a night that wasn’t quite as bad as it seems wasn’t what Sanders needed. Even a pretty good night wouldn’t have mattered for him all that much. Instead, he needed a stupendous night that redefined the campaign. Big wins in Missouri, Illinois or Ohio might have done that; so might have making Clinton sweat in North Carolina or Florida. Sanders didn’t come close to passing that admittedly high bar.

I have to admit to being discouraged by Clinton’s sweep on the Ides of March, but Sanders is not mathematically done yet. He does have to do very well in his best states, which are coming up. We will see.

In place of a Sanders ticket, some have talked about writing him in, and one of my friends is voting for Jill Stein. One of my very sick friends was planning on Trump as a second choice because only he and Sanders were open to legalizing the medical marijuana he needs, but he may reconsider. I suspect a lot of younger voters will just stay home.

CNN says Bernie Sanders is not a loser and that he has made Clinton a better candidate. Likewise, Clinton supporters are all smiles, saying that it is time for Democrats to come together to defeat the Trump menace. But Counterpunch reminds us that the Clintons are still neoliberals.

Who set the stage for Trump? Was it really just Republican dogwhistle politics? No, the primary engine of Trump’s and Sanders’ base was the neoconservative’s and neoliberal’s economic savaging of the working class to create a comfortable nest for elites on both sides of the aisle. How can neoliberals exhort us to defeat Trump when their very policies will be creating the next populist strongman – perhaps one for each party?

 

We’re In Tatters

Like every other pundit today, former Reagan writer and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has attempted to make sense of why the Donald is winning, and why his angry supporters aren’t heeling to the establishment Republican candidates this time. On March 2nd she wrote The Republican Party is Shattering. I can’t get through the paywall on that one, but I did find a reblog of her late February article, Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected: Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created. Her article is notable because even though most journalists and politicians like to pretend that America is a mostly classless society, she divides us into upstairs gentry and downstairs help right away:

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time. …

… Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.

And so did Bernie Sanders, though from a different subset of the unprotected: primarily underemployed young millennials, but also people of all ages that feel exploited by what George Carlin called, a Property Party with two right wings.

While the Republican Party is shattering in a very angry, Tea Party way, the Democratic establishment is watching a lot of its members reject austerity and drift away to build a more egalitarian paradigm in an Occupy way. And Democratic members of Noonan’s protected class, or what I have called the comfortable classes, are even more worried about Bernie Sanders changing their status quo than their Republican counterparts are about supposed billionaire Donald Trump taxing the rich.

I’ve written before that we will get the revolution we deserve , and that I worry that the angry right wing will be more proactive than the inclusive left wing. In either case, I think both parties will look very different in a few years.

Work and work for love and sex
Ain’t you hungry for success, success, success, success
Does it matter? (shattered)
Does it matter?

Can Sanders Overtake Clinton?

FiveThirtyEight has a little chart on the right of their main page today. They have established a target number of delegates that they feel each candidate needs by any given date to eventually capture the nomination:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 338/297 – 114%
Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

As you can see Trump is overperforming at 114%, while Cruz is way back at 61% and Rubio is failing at 46%. The corresponding headline: Donald Trump Is Just Barely On Track To Win The GOP Nomination.

Clinton is overperforming at 115%, while Sanders is much more competitive than the GOP rivals at 84%. The corresponding headline: Hillary Clinton’s Got This.

What gives? One difference is that Hillary is winning two-person primaries with margins around 60%, while Trump is often winning six-person primaries with just 35%. Things will certainly change, but at that rate Trump would never get to a majority of delegates.

Another is that Hillary Clinton has the full support, and collusion, of the Democratic National Committee, and a slew of uncommitted delegates that will fall her way unless she is trounced by Sanders. Trump is currently the bane of the Republican National Committee, and cannot count on uncommitted delegates. He has to trounce his rivals to avoid a brokered convention.

A Young Turks segment (on youtube) claims that Sanders actually did well on Super Tuesday, winning three out of the four tossup states and essentially tying for delegates in Massachusetts. They feel that he will overperform in enough tossup states to make it a real race.

Sander does have a lot of donated cash to work with, and time to campaign, but what has yet to be proven is how many of his younger supporters will turn out to vote. A recent Washington post piece claims that millennials only turn out for blockbuster films and big election days. His Super Tuesday victories proved that wrong in a few states.

In, War, Peace, and Bernie Sanders, Common Dream talks about Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders:

Gabbard, an Iraq war vet, congresswoman from Hawaii and “rising star” in the Democratic establishment, stepped down as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee in order to endorse Sanders — because he’s the only candidate who is not financially and psychologically tied to the military-industrial complex.

“As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know firsthand the cost of war,” she said, cracking the mainstream silence on U.S. militarism. “As a vice chair of the DNC, I am required to stay neutral in democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high.”

Because of Gabbard — only because of Gabbard — the multi-trillion-dollar monstrosity of U.S. militarism is getting a little mainstream media attention amid the reality-TV histrionics of this year’s presidential race, the Donald Trump phenomenon and the spectacle of Republican insult-flinging.

As the results of Super Tuesday started coming in on Tuesday night, Gabbard was given a few minutes to talk on MSNBC. While Rachel Maddow wanted to discuss the risk her Sanders endorsement might have on her career, Gabbard insisted on addressing the slightly larger matter of our unchecked, resource-hemorrhaging military adventurism across the globe.

“War is a very real thing,” she said. “If the Syrian war continues, we won’t have the resources to fund important social programs. This isn’t a question of the past — it’s a question of today. Regime-change wars do nothing to strengthen our national security, but they do strengthen our enemies.”

Good Pieces, Bad Pieces

With Donald J Trump in a commanding position on the eve of Super Tuesday, everyone is trying to explain to everyone else how the hell this could be happening. FiveThirtyEight dropped a small admission in their discussion of whether the Republican party is realigning:

Presidential elections already suffer from the problem of small sample sizes — one reason a lot of people, certainly including us, shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Trump’s chances early on.

But small sample size hardly covers the widespread dismissal of Trump by nearly everyone but cartoonist/blogger Scott Adams. Newt Gingrich recently blamed the media for rabidly covering and energizing Trump’s campaign – which is certainly part of it. At Barbarikon, Ali Minai discusses, What Donald Trump is doing to the Republican Party …. and may yet do to the Democrats, and lays the Trump phenomenon at the feet of the party itself:

For more than three decades, the Republican Party has been turning a large part of their electorate into a population of zombies who respond reliably to specific dog whistles, conspiracy theories and false memes come every election season. These triggers play on religious zeal, nationalism, suspicion of government power, fear of anarchy, economic insecurity, social anxieties, xenophobia, residual racism, and a host of other powerful emotions that exist in all societies. The so-called Republican elites have learned to exploit these emotions with finesse to win elections while, in fact, serving the interests of their paymasters in lofty mansions and corporate boardrooms. This project, implemented through so-called conservative “think” tanks, talk radio and Fox News with financial support from a few choice billionaires, has been wildly successful. It has allowed the Republican Party to hold the White House for most of the last thirty six years, and to claw their way back to power in Congress after a long exile.

The rabid nature of the Republicans is also certainly part of it, but given that there is a parallel outsider movement among liberals, one would have to look for some effect they share in common. That would be the flailing, disappearing middle class that the media has been loath to mention. Yesterday on ABC’s This Week, Greta van Susteren, she of the rigid face, thought that ordinary folk of both parties were so fed up with establishment politics that they were going for Hail Mary candidates.

Leave it to David Brooks, though, who in The Governing Cancer of Our Time tries to explain away the outsiders as inexperienced, narcissistic voters that want everything but don’t want to work for it:

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.

Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.

I have stopped reading Brooks, but one of my Facebook theatre friends, a local politician herself, posted this article as a great explanation – whereupon my head exploded. Young people aren’t against politics, they are against corporate ownership of politicians. Right-wingers aren’t against politics, they are against politics that sends their jobs overseas and brings in guest workers that will work for food. Once again Brooks has pandered to the wealthy and comfortable – at the expense of their children and employees.